...the media never really represents the tuba-playing, soccer-playing, science-loving,
bird-watching girl because she's just not an easy sell.

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

True Colors Revealed to be, Unsurprisingly, Blindingly White

I wish I had written this, because it's so well done, but really I wish no one would ever have to write anything even approximating this in America. Racism, xenophobia, sexism, and bullheaded deliberate ignorance of our own laws, all in one tidy package courtesy of Russell Pearce and Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and assorted nutters from the east and west.

Now it's not enough to cluck about illegal immigrants while pretending you're really talking about the Irish and Polish and Russian alongside the Mexicans, er, the Latin Americans, not enough to rage about oprimando el numero ocho para servicio en espanol and insist English is the official national language even though it isn't. Now all the pretense that it isn't really racism is being dropped, and it must come as such as a relief to be able to talk this way, about breeding seasons and dropping young like livestock, and stop pretending they ever thought these people were human in the first place.

"We need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but that's the way nature made it. Men don't drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do." That statement was being pushed by the author of Arizona's immigration law. He's not alone.

The neat distillation of current anti-immigrant thinking was in an email spread around by State Senator Russell Pearce, and cited by The Nation's Robin Templeton in a report on the recently revived, anti-immigrant rhetoric on birthright citizenship — the part of the Fourteenth Amendment that stipulates that babies born on American soil are automatically granted citizenship.

"It's invasion by birth canal," the leader of a California anti-immigrant ballot initiative told the Los Angeles Times. The head of an anti-immigrant group in Virginia called for an investigation into "whether or not illegal aliens have a preferred breeding season."